Twitch adds customizable tags for streamers

Twitch today announced that it is expanding its channel searchability features by introducing customizable tags and increasing the number of tags that broadcasts can have.

Tags on Twitch have been around since 2018 and were originally made as a way to help increase the ease with which viewers could find new channels that fit their respective interests.

Last year, the platform expanded its tags to include more than 350 tags made to help promote diversity on the platform. Tags included matters like race, mental health, gender, and sexual orientation.

But today’s change takes that to an entirely new level by allowing creators to make tags that uniquely describe their content in their own words, making the number of potential tags infinite. Additionally, Twitch is expanding the number of tags that channels can have for a given broadcast to 10, doubled from the previous limit of five.

Now that tags are customizable by creators, they are subject to the platform’s community guidelines, meaning that you can get yourself in trouble for tags deemed inappropriate.

With this new customizability, Twitch’s search function is getting tweaked as well. If you search for streams by using a tag, you will get a lot more results than before, but be assured that channels using the specific tag you searched will be at the top of that search.

A blog post by the platform noted that this is “just the beginning” for discovery optimization. While tags have historically been an underused way of categorizing channels, the platform is looking to give them a “more prominent role.”